Falsely Accused (3 page)

“Was he?”

“I didn't think so. The serology from the vaginal sample of the victim contained acid phosphatase, and since semen contains acid phosphatase, Warneke wanted me to say that evidence of sexual intercourse was present. But I pointed out to him that there are any number of food substances that contain it. Broccoli and cabbage, for example.”

“And snails.”

“And snails. I also pointed out to Warneke that Ettering had an intact hymen. She was a virgin. That usually rules out rape. Bloom claims in his letter that Warneke told him I had flippantly remarked in a conference about the case that the victim might have put snails up her vagina and that this could account for the phosphatase. Which is complete horse manure.”

Karp made a note. “There were other people at this meeting?”

“At least half a dozen.”

“Good. What about this one on our late vice-president? Did you really stand up in front of grand rounds at Metropolitan Hospital and tell the folks that the great man had expired porking someone?”

“Oh, God, no! I just did my usual dog and pony about the evolution of the M.E.'s office, and at the part where I say that one of the problems of the job is doing autopsies of notable people, I may have mentioned him. He'd died a couple of days before the presentation.”

“But no death in the saddle?”

“Of course not!”

“Wise. I expect we can corral enough distinguished physicians who were at the meeting to confirm it. In fact, when shown false, the charge is so infamous that it'll help with damages.”

Selig suddenly realized the import of this remark. “You're taking the case?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Karp. “You'll make an appointment, and we'll go over this stuff line by line.”

Karp shifted his swivel chair so that it faced the window and fell silent. He seemed deep in thought. After a minute or so, Selig cleared his throat and asked, “So—you think we have a good case?”

“Oh, no question. I'm a little rusty on employment law, but I'm certain that a public official can't be fired for cause without some sort of hearing.”

“The Mayor claims I'm—I
was
—a political appointee serving at his pleasure.”

Karp shook his head dismissively. “That's something we'll duke out. Even if they
could
fire you, I'm almost sure they
can't
fire you for cause without giving you a hearing. It's not a
Roth
case. God, I can't believe I remembered that!”

“Who's Roth?”

“Teacher at Wisconsin, early seventies. Untenured. The school didn't renew his contract, and he sued. He claimed that they didn't renew because he'd pissed off the university authorities by criticizing the administration. Defendants came back with the argument that they didn't have to give any reason at all for not renewing, and the Supreme Court agreed.”

“This is
good
for us?”

“Yeah. The Supremes decided he didn't have what they call a property interest in his job, because they didn't fire him, they just declined to rehire him. You did have such an interest. Also, and probably more significantly for our purposes, when they declined to rehire Roth, they made no statement that would impugn his good name and prevent him from getting a job elsewhere. And from what you tell me, the press conference and all, that's very far from your case. They canned you for cause, and went public that they thought you were a bum. They can't do that, not without giving you the right of rebuttal. We can work a little deprivation of liberty action in here too.”

To Selig's questioning look Karp added, “Liberty. Under Fourteenth Amendment case law, liberty includes the right to seek your customary employment. By maligning you without due process, they've limited your liberty in that way.” Karp stared out the window again.

“What are you thinking?” asked Selig when the waiting became too much for him.

Karp spun his chair slowly around until he faced Selig. “What I'm thinking is, why? Bloom doesn't like to make waves. He made plenty over you. And he must have used some pretty big chips with the Mayor to get you out of the C.M.E.'s slot.”

“Naomi said it's because he's a controlling asshole.”

“That's true enough, but …”—Karp flipped the copies of the complaint letters on his desk—“this crap, this snails nonsense, isn't enough to warrant the hatchet job Bloom did on you.”

“The reason's important?”

“Oh, yeah. I think in a way it's the key to the case. Not the case we'll argue in court, necessarily.”

Karp fell again into a silent study, and Selig, starting to become irritated with what seemed to him vagueness, changed the subject.

“So. What do you think this is going to cost me?”

Karp regarded him blankly. “Hmm? I don't know, Murray. Don't worry about it. We'll win, you'll
make
money.”

“But if we don't win,” Selig persisted.

Something hard congealed in Karp's yellowish gaze. “Murray, I said, don't worry about it. I'm taking the case.”

“But …”

“Murray,” said Karp with finality. “I'll pay
you.
”

TWO

Two women, one very tall, one of ordinary size, both dressed in silk kimonos, sat talking and drinking champagne on a bed in a loft on Crosby Street in lower Manhattan. They were wearing the gowns because they had been caught unprepared in a summer downpour and were being languorous before getting dressed again in dry clothes. The tall one was the freelance journalist whose peculiar name Naomi Selig had tried vainly to recall the previous evening, Ariadne Stupenagel. She was, to look at, quite as odd as her name. Over six feet tall and leggy, with broad mannish shoulders and wide womanly hips, Stupenagel had facial features in proportion. Her mouth was wide and lippy, her jaw strong, her nose generous. Her eyes, dark, knowing, heavily mascaraed and shadowed green-blue, looked as large as a pony's. She wore her dust blond hair piled up on top of her head in the manner of Toulouse-Lautrec's barmaids, which added another several inches to her height. If not beautiful in the conventional sense, she was hard to miss and memorable.

Marlene Ciampi, her hostess, was, in contrast, beautiful in the conventional sense, looking, as an artist friend of hers had once noted, exactly like Bernini's statue of St. Teresa in Ecstasy. St. Teresa was not, however, a smart kid from Queens with adorable black ringlets and a glass eye.

The meeting was in the nature of a reunion. Stupenagel had just returned to New York from a year covering the guerilla war in Guatemala. The two women were at the point of drunkenness in which confidences may begin to flow, and everything seems vastly funny.

“I can't get over what you've done with the loft,” said Stupenagel, refilling her glass. “It must have cost a fortune.”

“Yes, it did,” agreed Marlene, gazing contentedly out the open door of the bedroom at her remarkable dwelling. She had lived in this place since the days in which it was illegal to do so. She had with her own hands ripped out the ruins of an old electroplating factory and installed simple plumbing, electricity, heating, and cabinetwork. Necessarily, this had been crude work; as a junior assistant D.A., she'd had little cash to spare on comforts, although the mere size of the space—a hundred feet by thirty-three—made up for a lot. Nevertheless, she had lived ten years in what was little more than a shabbily furnished nineteenth-century factory: rusty tin ceiling, the floor of splintery planks where it was not concrete slab, tepid radiators, a tiny, fetid toilet, raw drywall partitions instead of proper rooms.

Now, however, she looked out on an expanse of satiny Swedish-finished oak flooring, glowing under the track lighting that hung from the smooth dropped ceiling. She had real rooms with doors and brass hardware. The creaky inconvenient sleeping loft was now a handsome bedroom, w/bath. The kitchen was right out of
Architectural Digest,
oak cabinets, a double stainless reefer, a Vulcan stove. Lucy, the Karps' seven-year-old daughter, had a cozy, carpeted bedroom and a well-stocked playroom. The stingy gas radiators were gone, and the whole vast space was heated and cooled in season by a climate control center that had its own little lair in a corner of the loft.

“Luckily,” continued Marlene, “we
had
a fortune. Last year Butch made about twice the
combined
total of what our two salaries were when we both worked for the D.A. It was like Monopoly money; we couldn't believe the numbers. Especially coming from D.C., where we were practically sharecroppers. So we figured while we were flush, and who knew how long it'd last, we'd better fix up the place. And there it is.”

Sounds of giggling floated through the open door. Lucy was entertaining a friend.

“Why wouldn't it last?” asked Stupenagel.

“Oh, I don't know,” replied Marlene. “It doesn't seem right, somehow. All that dough. And Butch is not a happy camper, not really. He was born to put asses in jail. One day he's going to come home and tell me he's quit Bohm Lansdorff What's-his-face and gone for a job with the Brooklyn D.A. or the Feds, and it'll be back to genteel poverty and the joys of public service. Meanwhile, hi-ho!” She poured herself another glass of Moët.

“Why doesn't he just get his old job back?” asked Stupenagel. “Assuming he wants to be a D.A.”

“Long story,” said Marlene dismissively.

“Mmm,” said Stupenagel, for whom no story was too long, and shot Marlene an interested look. When this prompted no revelation, she changed tack. “Well, you certainly seem to have taken to the life of a bourgeois matron,” she observed in a needling tone. “I never would have thought it, the way you used to carry on at Smith. Little Ms. Feminist—”

“Fuck you, Stupe,” replied Marlene amiably.

“Supported by a man. Dependent. Want to go shopping? We could buy slipcovers. We could play mah-jongg—”

“We could strike one another over the head with empty champagne bottles, me first.”

“Oh, is it all gone? That's almost as bad as your pathetic domestic slavery,” said Stupenagel, and then she called out, “
Marcel! Encore de champagne!
”

“I notice you don't mind sharing in the tainted largesse,” Marlene observed.

“Leeching off friends is completely different. There are numerous other people I could leech off of; I choose to leech off you from a position of absolute freedom. You expect nothing from me in return.”

“I'll say!” said Marlene dryly.

“That did not come out precisely as I intended. As you know, I would give you the shirt off my back, speaking of which …”

“I'll check the dryer. You can get your own wine. There's another bottle in the fridge, but you'll have to drink it yourself. I have to make dinner.” She got up and walked out of the bedroom.

“Oh, yes, God forbid hubby won't have his meat and two veg on the table,” Stupenagel called after her. Then Marlene heard the sound of a bottle being taken out of the refrigerator and the pop of the cork. She sighed as she removed her friend's dry clothes from the dryer. Ariadne was going to get pissed, and she could be a mean drunk. The last thing she wanted right now was to have to handle a gigantic drunken woman, two seven-year-olds, and a hungry and unhappy husband. Maybe Ariadne would just pass out. From habit, Marlene sniffed the warm clothes and wrinkled her nose. Personal hygiene was clearly not one of the journalist's strong points and hadn't been at college either, Marlene recalled.

“I could have washed these,” Marlene said as she tossed the clothes (black jeans, red Solidarity T-shirt, underpants, and socks) on the bed where Stupenagel was reclining, now swigging champagne directly from the bottle.

“Oh, God, never! Not a jot will I add to your domestic slavery,” exclaimed Stupenagel in ringing tones, and then, dramatically, “I'd rather wallow in filth.”

“You are,” said Marlene. “Get dressed. You can help me cut stuff up.”

Stupenagel groaned and put her bottle on a night-stand, then stood shakily and dropped her robe. She staggered nude to a full-length mirror, struck a pose with her chest thrown out, and groaned again. “Good Christ! What a great foundation for such tiny edifices!” She turned to stare appraisingly at Marlene, who was trying to slip into her own clothes as quickly and privately as possible. “Jesus, is there no justice? You haven't sagged an inch, and you're a mom! Marlene, if you die, can I have your tits?”

“Oh, grow up, Stupe!” snapped Marlene, tucking her blouse into a long denim skirt. “What would Gloria Steinem say if she knew you were still lusting after big knockers?”

“Easy for her to talk! She's got nice ones.” Stupenagel collapsed on the bed again and reached for the bottle. After a lengthy swallow she said, “So. This is it for you? Cook, clean, read bedtime stories?”

“Are you going to get dressed?”

“I will, I will. Don't nag me. No, really, tell me.”

Marlene recalled that this was one of her friend's little oddities. In college she would stride through the dorm hallways stark naked, frightening the freshmen and, on Sundays, annoying those who were entertaining men in their rooms with the door opened the prescribed eighteen inches. Another was also observable now: her ability to carry on a normal conversation while drunk, a quality she considered essential to success as a journalist.

Marlene sat on the bed and turned her real eye on her friend, being careful to keep in view the bedside clock-radio. “Okay, Stupe—here's the story. The loft in which we now sit is a condo. It's worth approximately three hundred and fifty thousand dollars and was purchased and sold to me for one dollar by an old Armenian gentleman, in return for services rendered.”

“Jesus! What the hell did you do for him?”

“I stole something back from someone who had stolen it from him. And yes, it's a great story, and no, I'm not going to tell it to you. The point is that my financial contributions to this family have been very substantial, when you add it all up, probably more than Butch's. So the fact that I'm not bringing in cash right at this minute has no significance. I bought this time and I'm enjoying it, without guilt, thank you. I like cooking. I like hanging out with Lucy. I like not having to deal with scumbags and assholes all day. It's improved my disposition considerably. So you can cut out all the ‘dependent' horseshit.”